But Sand was the writer of over a hundred volumes; she was the great friend of Balzac’s and confidante of Flaubert’s; she was a correspondent of Manzoni, Gutzkow, and of the anarchist Bakúnin — Gutzkow one of the greater thorns in Wagner’s side at the Dresden Opera house, and Bakúnin Wagner’s most radical friend during the Dresden Uprising of 1849; Sand was the European champion of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and she was inspiration to Dostoyevski, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, among her immediate contemporaries. Among her immediate successors, Proust loved her pastoral novels and Henry James wrote ten review-essays praising her art. “… [S]uch a colossal nature in every way…” wrote Barrett to Browning in the summer of 1845, a year before her fervent admirer the young Arnold visited Nohant. But was that nature conceived then as something personal? I think not. For she was often called “The Spirit of Europe.”
To get some idea of the awe in which a people and a nation could hold its national artists in the nineteenth century, read the description of Victor Hugo’s 1885 state funeral (two years after the death of Wagner), which opens Roger Shattuck’s study, The Banquet Years. The great writer’s remains stood for four days in an immense urn beneath the Arc de Triomphe, guarded by children in togas, endless brass bands, dignitaries, speeches, crowds, while, apparently, some of the frenzied populace balled in the bushes, yards away in the underbrush flanking the Champs Elysées (then a public bridle path), in hopes of producing, or so they said when apprehended, their own little immortal. The point is not that today we have no artists of such stature. Rather it is that the particular social configuration, vouchsafed in the public psyche, the conception of the nation’s greatest artist as the greatest of its civil servants, equal to its greatest generals and its grandest industrial tycoons, is simply no longer there. That, today, is no longer what the artist is. Even a Spielberg, Lucas, or Coppola — the distribution conduit of twenty to fifty million dollars with each new film, which then brings in a hundred-million-plus and feeds a gallery of images into the general cultural consciousness, images that may persist for years — is still not socially revered in the same manner and mode.
It is tempting to speculate on the machinery of such fame. In material terms, the greatest factor was doubtless the size of the literate population: in 1814, after a series of moody, speculative and narrative poems (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [1812], The Giaour [1813], The Bride of Abydos [1813]) had catapulted him to astonishing literary fame, Lord Byron’s narrative poem The Corsair, A Tale went on sale and sold ten thousand copies on the first day of publication, with lines outside London’s bookstores waiting hours for the doors to open. But the entire literate population of England at that time was slightly under five hundred thousand! The book went on to sell over a hundred thousand copies in the next year or so of its initial life. Ten thousand copies on the first day of publication would be an impressive first-day sale for a best-selling novel in America today. Such a book might well go on to sell a million or two million copies, in a literate field that is currently over fifty times the size of England’s in 1814. But Byron’s sales are even more impressive when we restate the Byron phenomenon in relative terms: Byron’s work was purchased by two per cent of the entire English reading population on the first day of sales and, in the first year, went on to be owned by almost twenty per cent of that population. For a book — be it a poem or otherwise — to achieve comparable success in the United States now, it would have to sell half a million on its first day and twenty-five million over the next year.
It is not that poetry will not sell in such figures today.
Books today simply do not sell at such figures: Gone with the Wind, during the whole of its phenomenal success since publication in 1936, has sold perhaps twelve million copies; in its first year, it sold no more than a million and a half.
This is the material situation against which observations such as, “Well, back then there was no radio, television, or film to compete with Byron (or Goethe, or Sand, or Hugo)…”—or even the more astute observation that, because The Corsair was not quite two thousand lines long, it could be sold at considerably less money than the novels of Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and William Makepeace Thackeray (who were successful novelists in the surrounding years) — become simply banal. The whole field against which such fame was constituted was so different from the contemporary that such statements do far more to mystify than they do to explain.
Goethe was, of course, the first artist to become such an international celebrity. But that celebrity was very much a function of cities and of the increased communication they fostered.
In this light, the fame of any serious artist is wholly a social construct. Keeping that in mind, we can ask: What sort of men and women were granted this celebrity? Certainly they tended to be titanic producers. At the same time, they tended to be very serious men and women about their art — and equally serious about their critiques of society. All of them were associated with some antisocial incident or action, frequently highly salacious, that tended to become a point of ethical debate around which any number of social arguments raged, so that they were figures of sexual rebellion and sexual desire. Byron loved his sister and was rumored to carry a great and melancholy curse — about as close as those days could come to admitting his bisexuality. Sand had appeared in public in men’s clothing and smoked cigars in her youth, and had left her legal husband, first to live with the poet Alfred de Musset, then with the Polish musician Chopin; Wagner lived in sin with Cosima (Liszt’s daughter and von Bülow’s wife). Goethe before and Hugo later had long and notorious affairs with… actresses! In the field in which their fame was constituted, this combination of massive work, high seriousness, and scandal was a terribly effective configuration. Needless to say, in a field differently constituted — such as the contemporary one — fame must work, both materially and psychologically, differently; and the conscious or unconscious efforts of the media to make these nineteenth-century parameters function to produce fame today is one of our greatest current comedies. In the end, it was not that such artists achieved mass fame to a degree that does not happen today. Rather, they achieved their relatively greater proportional fame before there was, in today’s terms, any mass audience at all.
The Corsair was a romantic, exotic, foreign tale — as distant from the bourgeois life of middle-class London as a poem might be. But Byron was the most English of English artists because The Corsair begins,